Rick Marini

Co-founder and Managing Partner
Dragonfly Partners

Rick is a serial entrepreneur with close to 20 years of operating and investing experience in the consumer technology space. Rick founded and successfully sold 3 companies (Tickle, BranchOut and Talk.co). He is an active angel investor in 45 early stage start-ups.

Rick is the Co-founder & Managing Partner of Dragonfly Partners. Dragonfly is a boutique advisory service focused on cross border transactions with deep expertise in the M&A market in China.

Rick was the Founder & CEO of BranchOut, the largest professional network leveraging the social graph with more than 800 million professional profiles. BranchOut raised $49 million in funding from Accel, Redpoint, Mayfield, Norwest, Floodgate and some of the top angel investors in Silicon Valley. In 2014, BranchOut was acquired by 1-Page (publicly-traded recruiting company).

Rick was Founder & CEO of Talk.co, an enterprise messaging app. In 2014, Talk.co was acquired by Hearst Corporation. Rick ran the Digital Innovation Group at Hearst from 2014-2016.

In 1999, Rick co-founded Tickle.com, one of the largest social media sites on the Internet. Tickle operated as a profitable company with close to $40 million of annual revenue. In 2002, Tickle won the “Rising Star” Webby Award as the fastest growing site on the Web. Tickle grew to more than 200 million registered users and was a top 20 Internet site. In 2004, Monster Worldwide acquired Tickle for $100 million.

Rick graduated from University of New Hampshire, magna cum laude, and earned a MBA from Harvard Business School. He is regularly featured in national press as a thought leader on entrepreneurship, early-stage investing and technology.

Rick was National Co-Chair of Technology for Obama. He is an angel investor in 45+ companies including Snapchat, Reddit, AngelList, Luxe, Poshmark, Lumosity, August Lock, AltSchool, Hooked, Opendoor, Honeybook, MassDrop and many more.